The last week, Pepperjam Network launched a beta version of Pepperjam Store Builder™, which is available exclusively through Pepperjam Network for FREE to all advertisers and affiliates.

Pepperjam Store Builder™ allows you to quickly and easily manipulate Pepperjam Network product feeds in real-time to build product storefronts on your Web site.  You can use Pepperjam Store Builder™ to easily link to specific products, create dedicated product feed Web sites, supplement your existing content or blog, add additional value to your coupon or incentive site, or for just about anything else your imagination will allow.

With Pepperjam Store Builder™ you have access to millions of products from hundreds of Pepperjam Network advertisers. You can automatically create storefronts by selecting any combination of merchants, categories, or keywords.  The more merchants and / or categories you select the more products that will be available to your Web site visitors. However, you may also choose to use the Pepperjam Store Builder™ search filter to refine your search to a specific kind or type of product.  For instance, you may select CostumeKingdom.com as your merchant, but only want to display “pumpkin” costumes.  No problem!  Simply use the search filter and type in “pumpkin” to refine the feed to show only the products you want.

Now, let’s check some screenshots to let you know how it works:

As you can see, it’s easy like a 1-2-3! Once you completed 4 easy steps you will get the html code of your store! And you know what’s the best of it? It is WordPress Optimized!

As you can see, you can customize everything you want: Products, links and colors! So it is perfect to merge it with your website or blog without altering neither the look nor the niche of your website.

So if you want to try and start making money with Pepperjam Stores, feel free to do it by signing up here. Stay tuned because the next week I will be dealing with this kind of stores!.

PS: Unfortunately I don’t have screenshots for you, thing which I will cover in the next week!

Hello readers, first of all I want to talk a little about the effects of my big Give Away. I launched the new version of my blog the past wednesday, and I launched the contest on Thursday 16th. Until now, I want to tell you that I have received over 100 signups on my newsletter, in addition of all those new RSS subscribers which increased my feed counter from an average of 240 to almost 400 ( yesterday it was on 498 ). So I want to thank you so much for give to my blog that awesome boost, and all that in less than a week!.

Now let’s see what was hot this week:

• How to Crack into Google’s Servers and Find Search Keyword Gold by John Cow on JohnCow.com.
• Website Flipping: Dig Deeper Into SitePoint To Improve Your Sales by Jay on Suite J.
• A – Z Blogging Guide by Yan on thou shall blog.
• Want To Start a Blog About Making Money Online? Think Again by Sly on SlyVisions.
• Why You Should Stay Away from the Make Money Online & Internet Marketing Niches by Gyutae on WinningTheWeb.
• The Future of Web 3.0 According to Yahoo! by Lidjia on ReadWriteWeb.

I hope you like this round of Spreading Love, I really enjoyed these posts… By the way, in the next weeks I will be launching a page with some new services which I will provide, so stay tuned to know what is coming on Mr Javo dot Com!

PS: Probably I will send you a special offers/discounts of this new services through my newsletter, so I recommend you to sign up to receive them! Don’t forget to vote on my polls!

Every time we want to create a website, we think about the sources of traffic. In my case, the most of my traffic comes from other sites, such as blogs and social media networks. In the case of search engines, I have noticed that I received many visits through the keyword “canonical url” due to a post that I wrote many time ago.

No matter what, the fact is that getting indexed and raking high on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others, is a must if you want to get tons of traffic through them.

As you may know, this is very related with the Meta Tags you use, something that I have explained in other post but I will retook in this post.

Submitting your website on Search Engines

The only way you will make money with your website is attracting visitors to it! Understanding by website a blog, forum, social media or anything else. You won’t magically get money with your website if people don’t see what you are offering. Of course you can attract visitors with PPC, paid advertising or blog reviews, but in this post we will deal with search engines.

There are 4 main search engines that you should submit your website on:

• Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
• Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2
• dmoz: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

I will tell you the truth, the only search engine which you should submit your site on is dmoz. If you use the form to apply for the other 3 ones you will be wasting your time. Why? Because everybody submits its websites through that forms and there are big lists of websites waiting months to be indexed. There are other way to get indexed by those search engines without using its forms .

For example, getting backlinks from websites that are already indexed can help you a lot, because all these search engines are constantly sending their spiders to scan every website they have indexed. So when they scan a website which is not listed in their databases, they have a mechanism that put you in automatically. So if you think to launch a new blog for example, try to get some backlinks from sites related with yours and this way, you will get indexed very fast. When I launch this blog, I applied the technique that I’m sharing with you know and I get indexed in less than 24 hours .

Build a Search Engine-Friendly site

The main difference of ranking among the millions of websites listed by search engines is because ones are more friendly than others to search engines. What do I mean by? Everything in your website has an impact on your ranking. Websites with many images and few text are terrible for SEO, how they pretend to be analyzed by search engines? I know they have complex algorithms but it’s not so advanced! In the other hand, websites with less dynamic structures and more rich text are easily indexed by search engines, websites with headers, the footers, xml feeds, alt tags on images, titles on their links and that kind of things.

Keep in mind that search engines cannot red the following information:

• Multimedia files like Flash or words within images.
• Content in frames.
• Content on dynamic pages.

The last point has changed a little with the passing of time, because if you think about the case of the blogs, unless you force them to create a static page, your content will be created on dynamic pages. Nevertheless, using static or dynamic pages your content will be read and recognized by search engines without problems.

In the case of images and links, remember to add an alt tag and a title, search engines register that kind of things when they send their spiders, also know as crawlers or robots.

Optimizing your website for Google

As we know, Google is constantly changing its algorithm to determine the rank of a website, and reason of that is simple. Among other reasons, they do this basically to prevent big sites from dominating results permanently. So as you can imagine, optimizing your website for Google could be a hard task because they are shaking the things constantly.

Google bases its algorithm starting from keywords. So I recommend you to check my preview post Finding Good Keywords For Your Website in order to know more about this topic. The fact is that PageRank equation is a big mystery, no one knows with exactitude which are the components which help you to have a higher rank, but there are some hints which appear to have an extra value on the formula:

• Inbound  Links from related sites with high PR.
• Inbound  Links from blogs.
• Inbound Links from .edu, .gov or .org.
• Outbound Links to high-ranked relevant websites.
• The size and quantity of information on your site.
• A Google Sitemap. You can generate one for WordPress by using this plugin, or by visiting this site.
• Updated content.
• Visible Title and Alt Tags.
• Using keywords on your Heading tags, bold and italicized words.
• Site traffic.

Optimizing your website for other search engines, such as Yahoo! or MSN

As you could see in the preview part of the post, Google focuses its attention mainly on inbound links, or links that point back to your site. In the case of Yahoo!, MSN or other search engines, they seem to emphasize on Meta Tags.

Meta Tags appear at the beginning of the source code of your website, in the <head> section. They provide information about your site to the browser and search engines, and the most important of them are:

• The Title
• Page Description
• Keywords

The Title can be set by using the HTML code <title> and it sets the title of your website, being this the text which the browser will display when someone visits your site.

The Page Description can be set by using the HTML code <meta name=“description” content=“Your site description here” /> and basically this is the text that search engines will show when someone find your site through they.

By the way, the second one is the result showed by Yahoo! and It seems that it’s not updated…

The Keywords tag can be set by using the HTML code <meta name=“keywords” content=“keyword1, keyword2, keyword 3…” /> and it lists the relevant terms for a website. Remember that it is really important to set only relevant keywords or you could get slapped by search engines! Also, I recommend you the following things in order to optimize your website for any search engine:

• Try to keep your keyword list under 20 elements. I know it could be hard, in fact I’m using like 40 now, but once you see which keywords are converting are which not, you should eliminate them from the list.
• Long Tail Keywords or keyword phrases are more useful that a single word. Basically this is because the competition and the macro-view, the more specific you are with your keywords the higher will be your rank.
• Do not include articles or prepositions ( a, an, the, on, from, by…). They are not necessary.
• Use lowercase in your keywords. If you capitalize them, capitalization will be required for match.
• Plural words include the singular ones when they are in the same root. For example, the keyword roots includes root, but companies does not include company.
• Phrases include the same words without spaces, i.e. make money online includes makemoneyonline but not vice versa.

Remember that when you use phrases, search engines try to match your keywords with the search manipulating your keyword, i.e. inverting it, mixing it…

What about dmoz?

This is The Open Directory Project from directory.mozilla.org, and it is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. It uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

It also feeds its results to Google, AOL and other directories of the web, spreading your website through many sites if you are listed there.

Once your submitted your site to dmoz it will be study. They don’t accept all the sites, you need to cover some requirements and possibly you will be rejected at the first time. Just remember to add your URL in the right category, this is a really important factor which helps you to get in, because if you are a little away from your path, you will be rejected automatically.

To Conclude

It is vital for a website to be indexed by search engines in order to get targeted traffic and attract new readers or customers. I encourage you to check my other post related with keywords and SEO in order to complement the extensive information provided in this post. I hope you like the tips! if you have any special thing that you want to share feel free to leave a comment!

The fact is that many people use this kind of marketing just to send unwanted emails, or commonly called as spam. In the last years, the number of spam messages in people’s inboxes have considerably increased. In a year, more than 3 trillions of emails are sent, of which an average of 70% of them are spam. For our luck, email service’s providers are constantly improving their algorithms to filter the good messages of the bad ones .

What should you know to run an email marketing campaign?

Well like everything related with marketing, creating a good campaign can take you more time than you expect. Obviously, the first thing you need to do is create a newsletter. You can do this by using Aweber, a service which you can send scheduled emails, broadcasts and configure autoresponders… And as every service of this nature, it lets you send bulk emails to your mailing lists.

Once you have ordered your email marketing service, you can start creating email lists and promoting your campaigns! On now, , let’s start with reviewing the things you need to have in mind to create and run with success an email campaign:

Respecting the Subject

• Keep it short: Make your subject as short as possible, with a maximum of 50 characters including spaces. This way, the message will be direct and concise.
• Keep it simple, don’t overdo it: Avoid using capital letters in all the words, as well as using punctuation like exclamation marks. In the case of the capital letters, they will be directly filtered by spam protectors, but if you want you could use exclamation marks, is not so bad but sometimes it could be misinterpret.
• Don’t forget your brand: Include your brand, i.e. the name of the company, product or service in the subject line. It helps the subscriber to recognize you.
• Create a sense of urgency: You can include time-depending words in order to encourage your subscribers to read the newsletter as soon as possible. Phrases like now, this week, for limited time, exclusive offer and similar can be use it to create this sensation.
• Motive the subscribers, entice it: You can let the reader know about the benefits it will get by reading the newsletter. Things like get free… or get a discount for… can work.
• Be honest: I think I have been a good broadcaster of that phrase. Being honest with the subscribers will create a sense of loyalty between you and they. You won’t get anything by deceiving them.

Respecting the From

• Don’t forget your brand: Your brand should appear either in the subject or the from fields.
• Use your website tags: This is something relatively optional, you can choose between adding or not the tags of your website, i.e. Mr Javo dot Com – Blogging and Internet Marketing Tips. This can give you good or bad results, it depends of its length. In my case, it’s fairly long to include my tags in the From field. If your tag is too long, I recommend you not to use it.

Respecting the Message

This is may be the most important aspect of email marketing because here will be displayed the information you want to promote. So let’s see the guidelines for this field:

• Provide relevant content: What would you feel if I send you through my newsletter something related with Food, Cars or Deports? Exactly, you could find it surprising and annoying! If you signed up to receive blogging and internet marketing tips why are you getting information related with other niches? So with this I want to tell you that it’s really important to match your content with your audience. You will get better click-through rates if you send relevant content.
• Emphasize your brand: Including logos and URLs related to your business will boost your click-throught rates and at the same time, you will be imposing your authority.
• Send copies in both HTML and Plain Text: It is very recommendable to send the newsletter in both HTML and Plain Text formats. The reason of this is because there are people who don’t allow HTML code in their email inbox. If the subscriber don’t allow HTML code the text plain version will be shown instead.
• Include a link to unsubscribe: Is a really important thing to include a link which the subscribers could use to unsubscribe for your newsletter whenever they want. By doing this, they won’t be moored to you if they don’t want to!.
• Provide a RSS link: If you constantly update the content of your website, as the case of blogs, you could include a link of your RSS feed encouraging the people to subscribe. Remember to tell them the benefits, i.e. a little message explaining them that they will get (quicker) updates of your site…
• Include your contact information: Is a must to include your personal information, like your company’s street address, phone number and contact email. Some services ask for this in their policy.

Ok these were the recommended things that you need to do in order to run an email marketing campaign successfully. Another great tip is to set a Follow-up message in order to give them a welcome when they sign up for your newsletter. This create a good relationship between you and them, and helps you to estimulate the sense of loyalty. For this message, you can include a kind of coupon or offer of your product/service to estimulate a sell.

To conclude this post, remember to tell to your visitors the advantages of subscribing to your newsletter or how do you expect to attract subscribers if you don’t tell them what will they win? Keep in mind NOT to send spam, and send emails only to people who are willing to receive them.

By the way, if you are not in my newsletter yet, I invite you to take part in to receive my very best tips, exclusive offers and mailings, in addition of a free copy of my ebook The Affiliate’s Start Guide .

What a week! With all the changes of the new theme I have had a very shaken week. Some minors bugs were reported by many of you and I want to thank you for every comment you sent me through the new contact form.

This week I found excellent post everywhere, I have added like 20 posts to my spreading love series of this week but we know that is hard to read 20 posts at once. So, I reduced that list, and now I will give you the most useful:

• The Visual Design of 2.7 by Jane on WordPress Blog.
• Who Will Control Your Data in the Web 3.0 World? by Lidija on ReadWriteWeb.
• Too Much Effort and No Progress? Something Is Wrong There by Daniel on DailyBlogTips.
• How To Get Sponsors: Leveraging Current Sponsors To Get Even More Sponsors by Mattaw on MoneyBites.
• The 3 Strategies of Link Building – Why & How You Build Links by Gyutae on WinningTheWeb.
• Do You Have the Balls to Make Money Doing What You Love? by Paul on InspiredMoneyMaker.com.
• Introduction To Offline Affiliate Marketing by Josh on Affiliate Famous.

Other Interesting things:

• Reader Challenge #1 by Dot Com Dud on DotComDud.
• Flip A Site Contest – Part 1 by Bryan on Site Flip U.
• My Firefox Addons by Stephan on StephanMiller.com.

As you may know, WordPress 2.7 is almost ready for public beta, so in the first article you could see how it will look. And talking about wordpress and blogging, I recommend you to check the post of Stephan, who talks about his interest firefox addons which help him in his blogging work… I hope you liked this round of posts!

Yesterday I had updated my twitter profile! I have upgraded the background image to give it a touch of coolness . Also, I added a poll on the sidebar of the blog, asking if you like the new theme or not… I invite you to give me your vote!.

Now I want to take advantage of this post to remind you to participate in my 2.0 give away! Now it has almost $2500 in prizes and daily I continue receiving emails from more and more sponsors!

PS: Did you noticed that all these posts have long titles? What a weird thing…

Many times, when you think about making money online, the phrase Affiliate Marketing crosses your mind, may be because we associate the word marketing with money. Is not a secret that you can make hundreds, even thousands of dollars a month with affiliate marketing but that is not too easy as many people say on Internet.

Myth #1 – It’s easy to make money

So if I’m telling you that is not too easy, you may be wondered why. Many people lie to take advantage of, that’s a fact! Let’s be honest, when someone says that it is easy to make money with X affiliate network and it shows you checks of thousands of dollars, is because it wants you to register on that network under its name, this way it could get commissions for what you make.

Of course, it is easy to make money when you have an army of referrals behind you.

Myth #2 – Low capital required

Remember that everything has a cost, if you want to make thousands of dollars you will have to spend thousand of dollars. Is fairly impossible to make thousands by investing lower amounts, remember that affiliate marketing is mainly based on traffic, so if you want to drive many people to your website you need to invest on PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords.

In addition of that, if you are promoting a campaign with 3% of conversion rate it means that 3 of each 100 visitors will (or could) buy the product. Of course that a good web design helps but that’s basically what it means.

You need to make your plans to compensate the invested (and wasted) capital for driving the other 97 persons to your website.

Myth #3 – You will get money fast

This is the most false myth ever. Before you start making real money and not a few bucks, you will need to try many different things in order to optimize your promotion. You will need to be changing the theme of your landing page, changing its keywords, its title and redistributing the things on your website. After then, you will find what is converting for you! So how much you will need to wait until the first check? That’s up to you, it depends of your work.

Myth #4 – Work just 2 hours a day

Huh? another false myth. Affiliate marketing is mostly carried out by entrepreneurs, people who like to experiment and look for new ways to meet their goals. It is completely false to say that working 2 hours per day you could get thousands of dollars. Well, may be after many years when you have all your campaigns already optimized, you could stop working if you want, but that’s not true. Internet changes and people too, so you need to be constantly changing your promotion and keywords too!

Setting up a website with marketing purposes could take you many time, you will fall asleep after midnight trying to do your best, checking you traffic statistics and optimizing what you have done.

My Personal Recommendations

In order to make your affiliate’s life easier and avoid to be consumed by it, I suggest you to put in practice the following things:

• Make backup plans: Is something is not working for me, I try to put in practice another concept in order to improve the performance of my work. Always is good to have backup plans, when something is going wrong that kind of special plans could safe you! And I’m not telling you this just for affiliate marketing, you should apply this for everything in your life.
• Set goals: May be the most important thing. If you don’t know your goals you will be doing things without sense.
• Set a schedule: Take a calendar and fix your hours of work, this way you could take off the shackles and do another activities beside working on your promotions.
• Be patient: Remember that money won’t flow through your account immediately, and it will take days, weeks or may be months to see real money in your accounts.

In my eBook The Affiliate’s Start Guide I talk about all the basics things to create a website and make money with it, so I invite you to sign up for my newsletter and get your copy for free now!